Buried giant

Mist before them, mist behind them, otherwise only a treacherous memory. Perhaps within it, they will finally find themselves. Elderly Axl and Beatrice have had enough of scraping by in their hobbit-like burrow in early medieval England. They decide to journey to the coast to find their son, with whom they once quarrelled. But it is the sixth century AD, and the mist-shrouded island lays all sorts of traps for them. However, it's not just the she-dragon from Celtic myths, from whose maw the mist billows, or the renegade knights from King Arthur's fellowship they should fear on their journey. The greatest threat comes from the Saxon barbarians who are building settlements here and will soon put an end to the existing world order. But as the couple, with a flicker of hope in their hearts, make their way to their dreamed-of sanctuary, the observer gets the ominous impression that their pilgrimage is not what it seems. The bond of this couple, and of the nation to which they belong, is far from idyllic, and something deeply buried in memory mars their conscience so much it sends a shiver down the spine… The 2017 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature has always shown, with elegance and urgency, the traumas that delusions in one's own mind can inflict. He does the same in this novel set against the most sacred English backdrop of the fantasy genre. On the eve of the twilight of the Arthurian myth, it is as true as ever that those who wish to understand the future must first understand the past. Including their own. “‘The Buried Giant’ is an exceptional novel. In it, the author is not afraid to follow up on major personal themes while fantastically weaving them into Old English mythology.” – Neil Gaiman, The New York Times Book Review “The novel deals with memory and what it might reveal. This time, however, the author searches for answers in a time riddled with forgetfulness (…), in a mythical England where, alongside humans, lives a she-dragon named Querig, whose breath has enveloped the inhabitants in a collective amnesia. (…) The story is more a fulfilment of an archetypal need: a search for a space that would provide [him] with enough freedom to explore the collective conscience.” – Jonáš Zbořil, Hospodářské noviny “In the manner of McCarthy’s ‘The Road’, the author has created a believable alternative reality, whose most powerful weapon is its psychological depth. Such a distinctive realm of imagination could have been created by no one but Ishiguro.” – Jason Cowley, The Financial Times “[The author] has always played with the unreliability of narrators: what they don't say—either because they don't want to, or because they refuse to admit certain things to themselves—was just as important as what they do say. Now, one can only infer the characters' personalities from their external behaviour.” – Michal Šplíchal, literarni.cz “If you mix Jane Austen with Franz Kafka, you get Kazuo Ishiguro’s literary perspective in a nutshell. And then, over that mixture, build a panoramic reflection on the human condition in the style of Proust.” – from the Nobel committee’s assessment in October 2017